up in smoke

There was lightning that jolted, not pulsed, through her veins. With every beat of her heart it was as if her soul was being poked like baby's fingers through an electric socket. There's no child proofing some things. We try.

We put plastic coverings over our skin.

We ourselves become that white carpeted room guest are only allowed to stand outside and marvel at, but never enter.

"Only for special occasions."

"Oh we don't go in there"

There's a mat outside that we all must wipe our feet on.

Trail as little of the outdoors in with you.

Its dirty there.

You don't know where that's been.

But then there's a storm. And the power goes out.

And the things you kept clean, kept to look pretty, locked to keep safe. You can't see it anymore.

It disappears.

Becomes imaginary.

In the dark it is no more or less real then the creatures birthed from your dreams. The creatures run out of your mind, they run across your white carpet, that's now black in the dark.

"You'll leave foot prints! You'll leave mud! You'll leave dirt."

then the creatures of his mind run out of his ears and cry out from the near invisble hole in your eye. Funny how floods can squeeze through something so small. They come swimming and tumbling down. And the floor is wet and muddy and they dance across the rooms together. mixing. breeding. conversating. howling. moaning. singing. screaming.

and the only glimpses of the maddness you catch are from the strobe light lightning thudump thudumping with each beating of your heart.

electric electric. and then you realize. a jolt of lightning from your heart struck his. and the muscle caught fire.

the heat of the flames made your plastic skin melt drip drip down and pool at the souls of your feet.

and the room only intended for special occasions went up in smoke.

and the smoke stung your eyes.

so you closed them.

and the howling grew louder.

and your nose burned with the smell of unbridled

animalistic. chaotic. joy.

raw.

and wiled and passionate joy.

and you grabbed a hold of one another's hands.

and you realized you too had been struck by lightning.

and you're heart was burning same as his.

hot and bright

you danced in the flames

you joined the creatures born of your fantasies and danced in smoke and fire until your joy consumed you.

and you weren't a room at all.

you were smoke.

and you rose until you mixed with the atmosphere.

no longer two flames.

but pieces of one same sky.

Ebb and Flow

Its funny how the inertia of expectations can sweep you up so quickly that by the time you've realized you've lost control, you've landed someplace completely unrecognizable.

Just a moment ago I was here. And now. And now my head his spinning and I can't walk straight. And i'm hardly even sure if i'm the same person I was that one moment ago.

We allow ourselves to become pushed a long by so many decisions that aren't our own, and in doing so we lose pieces of ourselves a long the way.

In the toss and tumble things like ideals, and hopes for the future, get lost in the dirt and you get rolled into someone else's desires and someone else's goals. You're left standing in the rubble, some Frankenstein concoction of other peoples ideas of who you are or who you should be.

Somewhere along the road I chose the path of least resistance. In doing so I freely gave away pieces of myself that made me who I was. Knowingly, willingly, I relinquished aspects of my life that brought me joy, simply because it was easier then fighting to keep them.

I never would have been able to guess what the repercussions in doing so would be.

Hindsight is an interesting thing, and with it I wonder if I would have done anything differently.

But time spent dwelling on the past is time wasted not taking an active role in your future. If any lessons have been learned it is this,

No matter your situation, no matter however limited you may feel, there are always options. There is always a choice, and we are never powerless to make it.

Choice is a gift that we have been granted and it is foolish to blindly ignore it.

Choice isn't easy. Every decision in life is give and take.

Ebb and Flow.

However difficult it may be though, make it. You decide. You be responsible because it is your life and you're the one that has to live it. Make it for you. Refusing to make a choice, in standing idly by while you are swept away by someone else's decisions, you will find your self on foreign shores and you will have to make a home there.

Consequences are ever occurring, regardless of whether or not they are the result of a choice, or of the failing to make one.

I've allowed myself to be swept up,

to quote a movie I'm too proud to name, I stood at the bow of a ship about to jump simply because of "the inertia of my life. and me powerless to stop it"

But you see, that's where I was wrong. We are never. Never powerless. We may be limited. But we are never powerless.

So although I've allowed myself to be blown a bit off course. I will, and I recommend you do the same if ever you find yourself in a similar position, gather my wits about me, brush the dirt off, and carry on, in the direction of my choosing.

Home is Where The Heart Is

From one uncertainty in life, we wander to another. Sometimes aimlessly and sometimes steadfast to a predetermined destination. In truth though, I think that we all find we are lost. Some are just more aware of it than others.

North, South, Left, Right. With the wind. Against it. Polaris who?

Direction means nothing. There is no such thing as a set course. You can not convince me otherwise. No path is set in stone. No journey impermeable to detours.

There were a few arrogant periods in my life where I honestly believed I was in control of the winds in my sails and the seas that I rode on. Clever and proud I shouted my own praises. I boasted and bragged and genuinely believed every audacious compliment I spoke.

Fate has a way of humbling those like myself.

Clearly I have learned nothing from literature because like Odysseus the Cunning, the gods were sure to smote me where I stood.

Once so sure and so unwavering, I was blown completely off course and lost at sea once more.

I haven't been quite sure of myself ever since, and still, I am not.

The difference now is that I've learned to find a lesson in everything, and in that I find comfort.

Isn't it comforting to know that there is no Supposed to Be no Final or End.

Isn't it comforting to know that exactly where you are is exactly where you're meant to be. With each destination we find ourselves at isn't it exciting to know that there is no such thing as a destination, because there is no end? We are never done traveling, learning, growing.

There are merely stops along a road. We are never lost, because we are always where we are and where we are is where we are meant to be.

We cant rely on a place, or other people to be home. Home is a right that can't be taken away from you as people pass in and out of your life. Home is what you take from those people and those places. Home is the lessons that you learn from that that build you up. Make you stronger. And prepare you for the challenges to come.

Tom Robbins says "We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes"

I argue that we are also our own Castles.

Our own Homes.

You can never be lost if you are true to yourself. For in being yourself, you will find, you are Home.

Bon Chance

Solace is such an odd state to find one's self in, and yet, that is exactly where I am. I've grown accustomed to it and am no longer distressed by changes that I once would have been.

There are many things that I was not afraid of, but change was not one of them. I held steadfast against it at all costs. Kicking and screaming, I ran from it.

Today I do not. Today I accept it, I watch it approach and pass by and I smile at it as it goes. I close my eyes and feel it walk through me. The waves of events to come washing over my present. Foreshadowings growing clearer, more apparent. They don't scare me anymore.

Saddness is so natural, but we hide it, coil from it.

I am learning to embrace it, and find the beauty in it. Take a moment and feel your sorrow shape you. Do you let it's weight encase you or do you push against it, into it, and fight it back.

It is through shared vulnerability that we allow others to understand ourselves. There is no creature alive that pain has not touched. We all experience loss, and its important to grieve but mostly, it is important to heal. If we spend our time dwelling on what has past, we will fail to appreciate the mystery of what is yet to come.

Curiosity and possibility are thrilling. Exhilarating. It is the electric pulse that charges your system and drives you forward. As much as I am uncomfortable with change, I am more tempted by chance. So live, and fail and lose. Brush the dust off, lick your wounds, and carry on, because there is a chance, however slight, that fate is on your side.

See your story through. Don't quit it in the middle just because you're afraid of how it might end.

"Are you always this articulate?" -Meg

I don’t particularly enjoy talking about myself, but they say to write what you know, and just about the only subject I feel qualified enough to say I know anything about, is myself. Sure I’ve read enough mandatory classics in high school to fake literacy, sure I’ve watched enough food network to feign culinary skill, and of course there is the plethora of nonsense I’ve learned from my avid TLC watching. But that’s the thing about multimedia these days, there’s an app, TV channel, radio station, and or magazine for everything. We can fake our way through any conversation these days, as long as you’re able to articulate your bull shit properly.

But I’m tired of bull shit. Really I am. Hence, these self indulgent ramblings, manifestations of the tangled mess that is the derailed locomotion of my thoughts.

Unfortunately, we are swimming in BS every second of any given occasion, and there is simply nothing that can be done about it. You see, above all else the virtue I respect and aspire to live by is honesty. The truth is the most valuable substance on this earth. There was a time when I would rather have one hundred truths over one million dollars.

Well not exactly, that itself is a lie simply to convey how much I love the truth. I’m a college student, I would much rather have one million dollars because I can barely afford my frozen pizzas (I actually have no culinary skill to speak of whatsoever). But let’s ignore the irony and press on. Thanks.

I seem to have just illustrated my own point, what can we just take at face value these days? Nothing. And even when someone is being honest, to their best ability, the truth at the end of the day is just as subjective as Coke or Pepsi.

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a planet named Pluto. It was the ninth planet orbiting the sun, until that fateful day it was downgraded and is planetdom rejected. FACT.

Once upon a time there was a great beast known as the Brontosaurus that trudged through lagoons until a scientist in Chicago realized that the wrong skulls had been placed on it’s skeletons for years and that Bronto was actually a Apatosaurus who much rather preferred keeping his feet dry if he could. FACT.

What is a steadfast truth today will thirty years from now be classified as utterly ridiculous.

Truth is not impermeable like I once thought it was, and is subject to change with our own perspectives.

This past March some girlfriends and I went up to Vancouver for spring break. We were together the whole time, but due to a few free rounds from our friendly neighborhood barkeep, each returned with very different versions of just what exactly happened that week. Although I can tell you that I know for a fact, without a shadow of a doubt that, I am right, and you are wrong, the truth is lost. And as long as I tell you my version first, who are you to question its accuracy?

Jonathan Safran Foer said “Nothing is beautiful and true.”

When I read this quote for the first time in Everything is Illuminated, it broke my heart. I’m about two decades old and I have yet to have experienced actual heart break, but this quote has come near closest to producing that effect.

It broke my heart because I used to believe in the truth. I believed in the truth like some believe in religion. I believed that all things in the universe all chain of events, all misfortunes and blessings, were all in some cosmic attempt to uncover the truth. Even if it was painful and cutting, even if it made you cry and wish you were dead, I believed that I would rather hear the ugly truth, over any other sound.

And that’s when I realized right there, it’s called the UGLY truth. No one ever claimed that the truth was or could be beautiful. The notion that it was this pure and lovely saving grace was a delusion that I’d imagined all on my own.

But what is so great about beauty anyway? I’ve had enough of it.

I’m throwing out my vanities, my bullshit, my make believe.

I’m trading them in for raw, disfigured, ugly truth.

But over time my truth may waiver.

But my truth is my own and I will do my best to tell it.

Maybe what matters most isn’t that we hit the nail exactly on the head. Real truth, is in my opinion unattainable, but what matters most is that we try.

Try your best to live honestly. Who are we trying to impress? Why do I need to know about poems and cooking, and science, and cars? You know your stuff, I’ll know mine.

Let’s cut the shit. We all have so much we can learn from one another, if we would just stop and listen, and be open to the thousands of different truths that there are.

What is right for me is not right for you, and I’m not claiming that it is or that I know better or that you don’t know anything. I live a great deal of my life coasting on a wave of neutrality bordering on indifference.

The truth, I am learning, is not a hard and fast fact like I once believed it to be. What is true right now will not be true ten, twenty, thirty years from now, and perhaps what matters most is simply that we are open to the possibility of truth.

Spring Cleaning?

I am sweeping up the remnants of things left behind, and searching for something worth keeping. Dusting off forgotten memories once treasured, now eroded by time, and their value considerably diminished. Interesting, the esteem you grant something when you can only see what’s on the surface of it. The shiny finish that made it sparkle wears off and you can see the metal that caused your finger to turn green.

I’ve yet to spend much time exploring life unsheltered, but despite its brevity, I have learned that keeping things and losing things are, in their own rites, equally difficult. And so I offer this advice, which I myself am currently struggling to follow, for the path, though clear, is perilous.

Throw out all which does not allow room for happiness.

We have cluttered our lives with hollow ambitions, false friends, and obligations to a clock and our wallets but not to our morals or our hearts.

We cling to routine, to cynicism out of habit, and to pessimism for fear of disappointment. Hoarding the things in life that turn us bitter, because we are afraid that in throwing them out, instead of making room for good, we’ll be left empty completely. Something, is better than nothing.

Perhaps.

But perhaps, nothing better than Something. Something Good. Something Great?

Every day I struggle with my own cowardice, but I’m learning that it is okay to let go. In my retrospection-inspection of my dustpan psyche, there are a few forgotten gifts I’d almost lost. Those few I will keep, but the rest, I must find the strength to part with.

We can not fear emptiness, because in emptiness we have room to wander.

Room to wonder?

Right now I’m musing in my emptiness. And I’ve yet to form a full thought on the matter, but my brain is tossing around this one word so many times that it must look like a piece of sea glass by now. But I’m so happy with it that stringing it into a sentence would ruin it’s magic. So I’ll give it to you to see if it tickles you the same way it does me.

Wonderful.

Wonder-full?

Birds Eye

Sleep has eluded me this evening. Not surprisingly, for although for me it habitually arrives far too early like a senior citizen to the dinner table, I’m in the midst of readjusting to Pacific Standard from the sixteen hour difference in the Philippines.

After tossing and turning in hopeless attempts to envision graceful lambs leaping over a wooden fence in a green pasture, counting them as they go, I’ve given up the effort entirely. Its now just after five and I’m sitting in my bed having a staring contest with my window. I’m not sure if I’m losing because I occasionally glance down to see what I’m writing, or if it’s losing on the count of its lack of eyes with which to stare, but we’ve got nothing at stake so the game is all in good fun.

I’m watching the sky shimmy out of its night time denim, and into a dusty grey. The sky seems tiered this morning, like I’m sure I will be, come this afternoon, but at the moment, I have a considerable amount of pep. More than one would expect any person to have at 5:09 on a Monday morning. Yes I see it now that the sky has a clear and definite case of the Mondays. It’s a grey as the suit of every number cruncher dwelling in every cubicle, as grey as thepartitions of their cubey domain.

Why is it then that I’ve got as much spunk as a San Diego pep squad? Because my friends, I’m a sucker for a sunrise. Plain and simple truth.

However this morning’s sky, and view of it, pails in great comparison, in incomparable comparison, to the stunning courtship of moon and sun that I had a front row seat to on my flights to and from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. My trip was lovely, life changing certainly, enjoyable? Definitely. But I’ve yet to decided whether or not I wish to divulge exactly what I gained from it as of yet. Maybe later. Maybe not at all.

No, right now we’re talking about the Sun and the Moon, and their never ending flirtation. One that has just this very moment turned the sky from grey to lavender, that as singled the first birds to start their chours and has whispered to the streetlights that they are free to go for the day.

Cursed as I was with the window seat for each of those twelve hour flights, which completely destroys any hopes of getting to the restroom, or of getting an attendants attention without having to disturb your sleeping neighbor, whom you nearly sat on while trying to squeeze past them to your seat, why dropping your carry on on top of their lap, I was granted a front row seat to a great love story that started well before I was conceived and will carry on long after any memory of me has faded.

The Moon and the Sun. Opposites in every way. One cool and reserved, tranquil and sublte. The other loud, apparent, obtrusive. One with the beauty of the Mona Lisa, with the same mysterious smirk on her face, (perhaps the only other being besides DaVincie that understand what’s so god damn funny) And the other with all the glamour of Marilyn Monroe, that would probably agree that blondes do have more fun.

Disclaimer. I don’t believe that you can place gender or orientation on celestial bodies but for sake of conveying a message I hope I don’t offend either with my lack of political correctness for whichever way they identify.

The two can barely stand each other, Moon and Sun. Or so they’d like us all to believe. But I’ve seen them together more clearly than ever now, and I’ve seen through their charade. Its all for show, one pretending they can’t share the sky with the other.

“Oh God, Sun’s here. Can you believe it? Who does it think it is? Come on stars, let’s bounce”

But much like grade schoolers in a sandbox, the tug of a pony tail and the blocking of Sun’s rays by Moon’s beams and vice versa really just mean, “I adore you”

Each spends it whole day, and night (respectively) counting down the hours until they can meet. It begins with a look. Not even. A peek. One peering over the horizon, hoping to go unnoticed just for a moment,

For anyone who’s ever had their heart pang and soften knows that there is no greater joy than a candid and genuine smile on the face of the one who chipped past your ribs to that stupid muscle in the first place.

Each prays for that one, private smile, to steal it away and carry it with them, but in their excitement they become greedy and dare to take a second, a better look. Not a glance, but a good stare, and in doing so, they are caught.

They react differently, the two. Sun, boastful, prideful, locks eyes with the Moon and beams red hot when it notices it’s guest. But the tease that it is, stupid flirt of a Sun, burns hotter than ever, the sky explodes in fuchsias, reds and marigolds, deep purples and hot pinks, then disappears.

“Gotta leave them wanting more” Sun gloats, as Moon is left waxing and waning, alone, until the stars eventually emerge to provide comfort and company. The more empty the moon is feeling, the more reinforcements come. Whether or not they bare pints of ice cream as my own girlfriends do in my times of need I can't be sure, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

Sunrisies on the other hand are far more kind. It is when the boastful, peers out of it's bedroom window, much like I am doing now, and gazes at it’s Moon. In sincere apology it rises slowly, tentitivley, gently even. In a hour where few are sure to see it, for prideful beings hate to applogize. A sunrise is bashful, and sorry. Not ornate like it’s set. It has no flair for dramatics. It knocks on mornings door, and the Moon graciously answers. And briefly, two sit in conversation.

I’m sorry. The Sun says.

The moon holds its ground. Sky still dark refusing to give an inch.

I’m sorry. The Sun says. And it draws closer, reaching its rays over the landscape, across the globe, and to the Moon, like arms stretching out for an embrace.

The Moon smiles.

And with that smile the shame of the Sun and the Moon’s night chill, slowly disappear. And the sky blushes in tangerine and baby’s breath, and lavender. And they hold each other, and for a few moments, before the world below them starts to stir, they are alone.

When the first paper boy jumps onto his bike and throws the first paper onto the first doorstop, the lovers are discovered, and the Moon, modest Moon, hurries away like a teenager caught kissing his girlfriend at her front door by her father.

But the sun is ecstatic, because it knows that it has been forgiven, loved, and that the day can start new.

And if you have a first row seat to this novella, as I did, high above the paper boys, the building tops, birds, and clouds, you can watch them even longer. And you can see the sky burn electric pink and azure. And you know that a new day has started. And that it has started with love.

So right now even though the sky has shifted to the color of a manila envelope, I’m confident that somewhere miles above my head, or below my feet depending on how you view the world, Moon is nudging Sun out of bed, sweeping away the crust from the corner’s of its eyes, and saying,

Good Morning, get out there, You’re going to be great.